Soyuz 7K-ST No. 16L (sometimes known as Soyuz T-10a or T-10-1) was an unsuccessful Soyuz mission intended to visit the Salyut 7 space station, which was occupied by the Soyuz T-9 crew.
It was set to launch atop a Soyuz-U rocket on September 26, 1983. However, prior to launch, the rocket caught fire on its launch pad at Site 1/5, Baikonur Cosmodrome. The launch escape system of the Soyuz spacecraft fired two seconds before the launch vehicle exploded, saving the crew of commander Vladimir G. Titov and flight engineer Gennadi Strekalov. It is so far the only case in which a launch escape system has been fired with a crew aboard.
The mission was a visiting expedition to Salyut 7. The crew was scheduled to return in Soyuz T-9, leaving Soyuz T-10 for the crew on the space station to return in later. The failure briefly led to speculation in the West that the crew of Soyuz T-9 may be stranded on the space station, but this was never the case. That crew would return to Earth as normal on November 23, 1983, aboard Soyuz T-9.
Robbert Hutchings Goddard (1882–1945) is considered to be one of the fathers of modern rocket propulsion. A physicist of great insight, Goddard also had a unique genius for invention. By 1926, Goddard had constructed and tested successfully the first rocket using liquid fuel. Indeed, the flight of Goddard's rocket on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, Massachusetts, was a feat as epochal in history as that of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. Yet, it was one of Goddard's "firsts" in the now booming significance of rocket propulsion in the fields of military missilery and the scientific exploration of space. Goddard's work largely anticipated in technical detail the later German V-2 missiles, including gyroscopic control, steering by means of vanes in the jet stream of the rocket motor, gimbal steering, power-driven fuel pumps and other devices. His rocket flight in 1929 carried the first scientific payload, a barometer, and a camera. Goddard developed and demonstrated the basic idea of the "bazooka" two days before the Armistice in 1918 at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Goddard was the first scientist who not only realized the potentialities of missiles and spaceflight but also contributed directly in bringing them to practical realization. This rare talent in both creative science and practical engineering places Goddard well above the opposite numbers among the European rocket pioneers.
